3 Ways to Introduce Your Main Character | Write Better Characters

One of the biggest bugaboos in manuscript submissions is when the author doesn’t properly introduce the protagonist within the first chapter. Readers want to know quickly the protagonist’s sex, age and level of sophistication in the world of the story, and they want to relate to the character on an emotional level. Readers’ interest in the protagonist has to be earned, in other words.

(10 questions you need to ask your characters.)

If we like a character, then we want to see her do well and we’re willing to follow her around and invest our time and interest in rooting her on in her struggle. But it’s important we know some essentials about the character so we can get to like her. The trick is to avoid stand-alone description or exposition and to instead show your character in action.

A character’s physical description—unless markedly different than the norm—does relatively little to draw the reader in. The character’s actions, or details such as his occupations and interests, are much more useful. The readers will furnish a perfectly good description on their own if you simply let them know that the Uncle Charley of your story is a butterfly collector, or the elderly toll-gate keeper on the Suwannee River. Doing so will accomplish more than 10 pages of describing hair and eye color, height, weight and all of that kind of mundane detail.

(How to Write a Character Who Is Single.)

My own writing contains very little description of any of my characters—it’s virtually nonexistent—yet for years I’ve asked readers if they can describe a character I pick at random from my stories, and invariably they come up with a detailed description, no matter which character I choose. When I tell them I haven’t ever described the character mentioned, they’re surprised, and some swear that I did, even going so far as to drag out the story and skim for where I’ve included the description. They never find it.

The point is, physical descriptions of characters are overrated and the poorest way to give the reader a mental picture of your character. Physical description is valuable only if it actually means something in the story: For instance, a character with a pronounced limp—a limp that is crucial to his person—runs the Boston Marathon and wins.

Bestselling British writer Nick Hornby starts his novel How to Be Good by taking us through his protagonist’s inciting incident, revealed in an action that is contrary to her normal behavior and personality.

Wow! Don’t you wish you’d written that? I sure do!

While we are being taken through her story-problem-creating crisis, we learn a great deal about protagonist Katie Carr. First, she comes across as surprised and amazed at her own behavior, which she herself views as diametrically opposed to the kind of person she is. She’s just not the type (at least in her own mind) to blurt out her desire for a divorce to her husband over a phone. The implication behind the words is that she’s fairly dumbfounded that she’d even consider a divorce, much less announce this over the phone. The readers suspect that they’ve perhaps come across an unreliable narrator, and unreliable narrators almost always carry the promise of at least some fun (for the readers) in a story. It’s exciting to try to figure out the truth of a character from the clues the author provides.

(8 tips to writing unreliable narrators.)

Or, it may be that this really is her true character and that it took a cataclysmic event (her marriage breakdown) to force it to the surface. In either event, this opening promises an intriguing read and it does so by showing the character in action. She’s saying she’s a woman of no surprises—that she lives her life in a conventional and probably even boring fashion—but then she performs a totally unconventional (for her) action. Who wouldn’t want to read on to find out why she’s acted in this way? Quite a few couldn’t resist—this novel ended up a New York Times bestseller.

A very different example of establishing the protagonist’s character from the start is found in crime novelist Michael Connelly’s Lost Light:

What makes this opening different? Well, it’s by a brand-name author with a sizable audience already in place. Michael Connelly’s books have made the bestseller lists at least 19 more times than I’ve hit a grand-slam walk-off home run at Yankee Stadium as a member of the Bronx Bombers. This means he can write just about any opening he wants and it’s going to get published. It also means that in the hands of a writer without a ready-made audience such as Connelly enjoys, opening with the protagonist’s bit of philosophy might not work, if not done well. It could easily come across as sentimental or self-indulgent.

(The differences between a crime novel, mystery novel, and thriller novel.)

There is, however, another factor at work here. Connelly writes detective novels and his protagonist, Hieronymus Bosch, is a character he uses a lot. Nineteen times, in fact. One reason a series character becomes popular is because of some bit of individuality that endears the character to the readers and makes him interesting. One of Bosch’s quirks is that he is a deeply philosophical man. He’s not just a guy who runs around solving crimes. He chooses to investigate only crimes that he has a philosophical interest in, usually an aspect of something he perceives as a character flaw in himself. Solving the crime is a way for Bosch to work out his own psychological problems. Which is the reason that Connelly’s novels transcend genre and can be considered literary as well as popular. They are as much about the inner psychological life of a character as they are about the crime to be solved.

We can see from the beginning that Bosch is a detective with a deep soul and a thoughtful, reflective mien. What the author chooses to reveal about his character is telling. This is a character worth knowing better—a character with depth.

We can also see from the beginning that there’s trouble ahead. The narrator has already told us he’s about to be engaged in a dark struggle, a struggle as much against himself as against his onstage adversary.

And so we read on. As will your readers, should you craft such a beguiling opening.

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